Meet the New Freelancers in the NYC Shopify Partner Studio

Spring means new: new grass, new leaves on trees, new clients, and new ecommerce web design projects. It also means we’re opening up our New York City Partner Studio to six new freelancers.

For the past three months, we’ve been working closely with Jeffrey Zeldman — founder and publisher of A List Apart — to create a coworking and mentorship space that helps young freelancers grow their ecommerce web design businesses. Our first round of the Partner Studio brought together six freelancers from many different walks of life for three months of intensive collaboration and learning.

Now, six new ecommerce designers and developers are about to start their own career-building adventure from our Madison Ave. office space.

Without further ado, meet the newest members of our NYC Partner Studio crew!

Mark Henderson

Software Consultant

Why he’s excited: I’m excited about the opportunity to gain access to the executives and professionals associated with the Partner Studio, and learn from their insights about areas that I don't have expertise in, like business development and finance.

What he’s working on: I’ll be improving upon my fledgling "Pay What You Want" Shopify app, to get it ready for its full 1.0 launch at the end of my residency.

Chanelle White

Web Designer and Digital Strategist

Why she’s excited: Since I work remotely in a small town, I can't wait to work in NYC, connect with my fellow partners, and hopefully collaborate on some exciting projects. Plus the opportunity to learn from the Shopify team and Jeffrey Zeldman will be truly game changing.

What she’s working on: I want to focus on being a strategic design partner with my clients by marrying beautiful websites with measurable results. I also want to realign my freelance offerings in a way that helps next-level solopreneurs truly grow their business. Finally, I'm excited to learn about Shopify theme development, so I can leverage my existing ecommerce designs and turn them into themes.

Randy Champagne

Full-stack Developer

Why he’s excited: This is going to be an epic adventure! It is an honor to work with and learn from brilliant creatives, entrepreneurs, and seasoned industry icons.

What he’s working on: I am really excited about the new APIs Shopify released this spring. I want to work on integrating these technologies into my workflow in order to supercharge my development process. As a full-stack developer, it is essential that I am able to reuse design themes and make them work with various backends. By streamlining my development, I can invest more of my time on UX research and design.

Daniela Otalvaro

Integrated Designer and Art Director

Why she’s excited: I'm mostly looking forward to meeting other industry creatives and sharing knowledge with them while working from an awesome location.

What she’s working on: I will be working on designing and developing a website and mobile app for the surf photography community. I’ll also be working on various smaller projects for other clients, such as designing an application for a recruitment company, brand development for a roofing and construction company, and various other digital and print design projects.

Xavier Armand & Chuong Nguyen-Thanh

UX Designers

Why they’re excited: We’re looking forward to the opportunity to collaborate with others to push the limits of Shopify.

What they’re working on: For the most part, we’ll be working on improving existing Shopify stores. We’re also interested in creating Shopify apps. We want to leverage our experience with enterprise ecommerce clients and build something that integrates features like reserve online or pick-up in store. We’ve seen a demand for this stuff at the enterprise level, and we think it would be awesome for a lot of existing merchants.